Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in classical music, the final movements of instrumental pieces—the finales— were almost always in fast tempos, and they usually ended loud, and emphatically. No matter where the rest of the piece had taken us, the finale was meant to provide a resolution, a sense that we’d just heard a complete work of art, a satisfyingly complete narrative, with a beginning, a middle, and—in no uncertain terms—an end. There was a kind of affirmative philosophy